Oakland’s trash contract is still garbage, even with changes

The Oakland City Council pared down sky-high rates for commercial compost pick-up on

Oakland merchants protest city garbage contract in July.

Tuesday evening– but at the cost of a local call-in center for Waste Management customers and a dozen living-wage union jobs, the kind the city has wanted for years.

Savings to commercial customers is valued at $2 million. But Waste Management won’t lose a dime. Instead they had the city carve out other savings from their contract: axing those jobs and reducing the amount of trash the company has to pick up from illegal dumping sites and public garbage cans.

But I don’t put this on the garbage company. I put it on the city because caveat emptor, baby. Let the buyer beware. They bought into a garbage contract they couldn’t afford.

It went into effect in July. But it was an “upside down” contract that gave businesses no incentive to compost because it cost them more to have scraps picked up than to toss everything into the trash.

On Tuesday, the council did what little they could to ease the pain. By a vote of 5-to-2 (Rebecca Kaplan was absent, and Desley Brooks and Noel Gallo opposed it) the council reduced the price of commercial composting to 30 percent below the garbage rate. The price rises in July to 25 percent below the garbage rate.

The garbage company will also fund a senior citizens garbage discount of up to $100,000. It’s not altruism, though. It’s a tax write-off.

Some council members apologized for the city’s contract with Waste Management. Council President Lynette Gibson-McElhaney admitted it was “a mess.”

City Administrator Sabrina Landreth joked that the city’s negotiations with Waste Management last year should be offered up as a primer in “How Not to Put Together a Garbage Contract.”

The city’s decision to cut money from the contract by canceling the local customer call-in center and routing calls to Arizona– a state the city vowed in 2010 not to do business with because of its anti-immigrant policies — violated the spirit, if not the letter, of that resolution. But the city found a way around even that.

The Oakland City Attorney’s office weighed in with a legal opinion that said the city’s resolution prohibits it from buying and purchasing goods and services in Arizona, but makes no mention of a “franchise” agreement.

That just about says it all, doesn’t it? While the city law does not specifically prohibit using an Arizona call center, it’s a business transaction that benefits Arizona — and that’s the whole point of the alleged ban isn’t it?

But hey, Council member Dan Kalb demanded on Tuesday that the Arizona workers be well-versed experts in the particulars of Oakland’s garbage contract. Perhaps if the council itself had adopted that policy we wouldn’t find ourselves in a re-negotiation where we’re the only party making concessions.